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Passage - Life and Death in 500KB.

A thirty year old programmer named Jason Rohrer, after thinking about life and death, came up with this amazingly simple "game." The arrow keys control your character (you can also use an Xbox 360 controller), and you can move up or down in the world (don't forget this) to explore "life." This little app will take five minutes of your time, but hopefully it'll hit the emotional mark it was going for.

Screenshots:

[size=+2]Warning: These spoil the entire point of the five minute playthrough. You might as well play it.[/size]

I think it's awesome, really. It's quick, to the point, and very emotional. I hope that when he shows it to his wife, she loves it as much as everyone who's played and enjoyed it.

There's even an article on his feeling's about it, but I wouldn't read it until after you've played it.

NOTE: I hope this isn't considered site whoring, since I've given just about all of the info on the little bugger I can without giving it away. It's something I simply wanted to share, and maybe discuss the point, but mostly just share.

At first I thought the game was trying to convey that moving through life quickly is a very shallow way of doing it. I mean, if you move really quickly the entire background becomes fuzzy, as do your character, so I interpreted that to mean that shooting through life makes you lose perspective. When you stand still you are able to see things a bit more clearly.

Of course, I don't think I saw one treasure thing and when my wife died I was seriously like D:

Hunh. I was going to make this very thread here today, but I did a search and saw that people had verbally crapped all over Passage in the "Indie Games" thread, so I figured why bother.

I did, however, make a thread about it over at the SomethingAwful forums which spawned a fair bit of discussion, so these comments are mostly copied from my comments there:

What impressed me about Passage was that with some definitively Atari-esque graphics and almost no gameplay, he managed to convey an emotion (and arguably a philosophical perspective) through a very straightforward nonlinear [in a sense] experience, rather than through simply reading / hearing / watching a story.

Honestly, on a conceptual level, everything he did impresses me more the more I think about it. The "future"/"memory" device is really clever, having the area around you be clear, but having the future be very hazy when you're young, and the past get hazier as you get old. Also, the very simple, but eloquently implemented, "limitations" of marriage. You have a companion who will help you (you get more points for finding chests if you have her), but your travel options become limited and eventually you have to deal with her loss. The moment when she very suddenly is replaced by a tombstone is more jarring than I expected.

Really well thought out, for what it is - which is a five minute experimental title, NOT an earthshattering artistic statement, as some people were criticizing it at SA as though it were supposed to be. I felt kind of like it was a poem, in game form. And its being in game form means it is partially written by the player, which is notably different from any other kind of poem. It doesn't have to change the world to make that pretty neat. :^:

I do hope he shows it to his wife someday. It's certainly sad at the end, but I also found it touching, and not really depressing in retrospect. We DO all die, but this game is pretty much 100% focused on the choices we have before that happens. I would think (hope) that his real spouse would find their choices reaffirmed by this sort of thing.

I mean, I get the point... It's talking about how life is a long road full of obstacles... And the the only thing you get in the end is death.

Woah... Shit. What a great as game. The music was actually really good.

Seriously, I get that the author has recently experienced a death of someone close to him, but that doesn't excuse the game for being extremely nihilistic and trite.

Everything is meaningless because one day you die. Also, despite the fact that you meet your wife at age 10, you will never ever ever have children or leave any sort of legacy. All you will have is squished memories of the colored regions of the past! (Ok, that part might be fairly accurate)

And lets be realistic here, Females have universally longer life expectancy than males. You should be the one plunking dead first.

Seriously, I get that the author has recently experienced a death of someone close to him, but that doesn't excuse the game for being extremely nihilistic and trite.

Everything is meaningless because one day you die. Also, despite the fact that you meet your wife at age 10, you will never ever ever have children or leave any sort of legacy. All you will have is squished memories of the colored regions of the past! (Ok, that part might be fairly accurate)

And lets be realistic here, Females have universally longer life expectancy than males. You should be the one plunking dead first.

I actually don't find the game nihilistic at all. Trite I'll give you, but I don't think that's necessarily bad. When you take into account that he's giving a very broad representation of life as a bunch of freaking pixels in five minutes, I think you can forgive the absence of children, jobs, etc.

I think it's a pretty straightforward display of choices and consequences. Greatly simplified? Of course. But not badly represented, for how simplified it is. As someone in the SomethingAwful thread mentioned, after several playthroughs he found that even though the game was arguably harder with the spouse along, he found he didn't want to play through it without her.

A game that can elicit that sort of response from a player is not a waste of time, especially not when the time involved is less than it takes to flip channels or go to the bathroom.

And the absence of a "legacy" is only nihilistic if you think that the purpose of one's life is to build such a legacy. Which is fine if you happen to think that, it just isn't the focus of this particular game...thing. Personally, it never even occurred to me as I was playing that a legacy aspect was missing.

It's hugely open to interpretation, of course - which is kind of the point.

EDIT: You are right about the life expectancy thing, though. That DID cross my mind while I was playing.

Is the hidden lesson that marriage will hold back your treasure-getting opportunities? I got like twice as many points as a bachelor.

And honestly, this games' resonance with some people is more a testament to the human imagination than clever design. The 'game' is designed to be as minimalistic as possible, and so as people we naturally pick up the slack ourselves and imagine relationships and emotions that the game only gives barely the slightest of hints at to make it more interesting. An interesting converse is that as game experiences become more and more fleshed out with increasingly "lifelike" fidelity there is less and less opportunity for us to fill in the gaps ourselves and we are forced to only accept what the developers present to us, like a film.

Seriously, I get that the author has recently experienced a death of someone close to him, but that doesn't excuse the game for being extremely nihilistic and trite.

Everything is meaningless because one day you die. Also, despite the fact that you meet your wife at age 10, you will never ever ever have children or leave any sort of legacy. All you will have is squished memories of the colored regions of the past! (Ok, that part might be fairly accurate)

And lets be realistic here, Females have universally longer life expectancy than males. You should be the one plunking dead first.

I actually don't find the game nihilistic at all. Trite I'll give you, but I don't think that's necessarily bad. When you take into account that he's giving a very broad representation of life as a bunch of freaking pixels in five minutes, I think you can forgive the absence of children, jobs, etc.

I think it's a pretty straightforward display of choices and consequences. Greatly simplified? Of course. But not badly represented, for how simplified it is. As someone in the SomethingAwful thread mentioned, after several playthroughs he found that even though the game was arguably harder with the spouse along, he found he didn't want to play through it without her.

A game that can elicit that sort of response from a player is not a waste of time, especially not when the time involved is less than it takes to flip channels or go to the bathroom.

And the absence of a "legacy" is only nihilistic if you think that the purpose of one's life is to build such a legacy. Which is fine if you happen to think that, it just isn't the focus of this particular game...thing. Personally, it never even occurred to me as I was playing that a legacy aspect was missing.

It's hugely open to interpretation, of course - which is kind of the point.

EDIT: You are right about the life expectancy thing, though. That DID cross my mind while I was playing.

Stuff that he wrote on his explanation page give me a nihilistic vibe too

Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible, but in the end, death is still coming for you. Your score looks pretty meaningless hovering there above your little tombstone. This treatment of character death stands in stark contrast with the way death is commonly used in video games (where you die countless times during a given game and emerge victorious---and still alive---in the end). Passage is a game in which you die only once, at the very end, and you are powerless to stave off this inevitable loss.

Emphasis mine. It gives me that good ole nihilistic vibe, but that could be just my interpretation. At the very least, he seems to be against the idea that getting a really really freakin' high score is a good objective in life.

Emphasis mine. It gives me that good ole nihilistic vibe, but that could be just my interpretation. At the very least, he seems to be against the idea that getting a really really freakin' high score is a good objective in life.

(I did like the music though, that's pretty universal)

Nihilists? Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it's an ethos.

It didn't really do anything for me at all, and I'm a huge sucker for philosophical, emotional wankery. I appreciate it as a statement of what he was trying to do, but eh... didn't really impress or move me.

Cherrn on January 2008

All creature will die and all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai.